Fabricated snack products prepared from doughs comprising starch-based materials are well-known in the art. These doughs typically comprise dehydrated potato products such as dehydrated potato flakes, granules, and/or flanules. The doughs can also comprise a number of other starch-based ingredients, such as wheat, corn, rice, tapioca, barley, cassava, and potato starches, as well as flours. These other starch-based ingredients are typically included in the doughs in lesser quantities than the dehydrated potato products.
The advantages of preparing such food products from a dough rather than from sliced, whole potatoes include homogeneity or uniformity in the end food products and the ability to more closely control the separate steps involved in the preparation of the food products. Additionally, preparing fabricated snack products from dough provides the flexibility to formulate such products according to the availability of raw materials and to consumer desires for various textures and flavors.
Rice flour is a material that is available globally. Its mild flavor makes it suitable for combining with potato products to make fabricated potato snacks. Furthermore, rice flour is suitable for use in making high-intensity flavored seasoned snacks, since the rice flour's neutral flavor does not compete with that of the seasoning.
Although rice flour can be included in fabricated snack doughs, its inclusion can lead to processing and product quality issues which are not easily solved. For example, the addition of rice flour can result in elastic doughs that are difficult to cook, dry, or fry. Furthermore, the fabricated snack products resulting from these doughs can be either too hard or too soft, with a cracker-like texture and an undesirable raw taste. This is, in part, caused by the difficulty in cooking rice flour, as rice starch has one of the highest gelatinization temperatures among the starches available for use in snacks. That is, such high gelatinization temperatures prevent the starch in rice flour from being easily degraded as is necessary in processing.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a rice flour composition that is suitable for use in making fabricated snack products.
This and other objects of the invention will become apparent from the following disclosure.